


the yawning vast come calling

by faedemon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Leitners, Lichtenberg Scars, Minor Character Death, Minor Delusions (which the spiral causes), Missing Scene, Mold/Rot, POV Second Person, general eye fuckery for the cyrillic book's chapter, mike "fuck around and find out" crew, mike really said hmm let me whore myself out for entities to see which one fits, thatll b mike's parents, the spiral the corruption the flesh and the eye make cameos of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:14:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: - achy, head-throbbing unreality- something you didn’t want to be there but was- being trapped, taking the reigns to twist open a new exit- startlingly neutral, but with the faintest hint of attention- weightlessness, adrenaline, freedom
Comments: 18
Kudos: 26





	1. 001: Lichtenberg Figure

**Author's Note:**

> this was written during the height of the BLM movement. the content of the piece doesn't reflect the time because i used ao3 and fanfiction as an escape, but i do acknowledge the severity of the state of things and i am doing my best to listen to minorities and support them in all the ways i can.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mike is struck by lightning.

There are a number of things that could have been the beginning. Perhaps it was the day you first rode a rollercoaster: adrenaline and the drop of the stomach and the whip of wind conflating into a sensation, a beauty, indescribable and yet so potent that you chased it forevermore. Perhaps it was the first time you picked up a Leitner, when Filth invaded your home and sent it careening to the ground.

And perhaps yet it was the storm: the last one that met you before you turned eighteen and _Ex Altiora_ fell into your palms. You were eight years old. You were young, and had a friend. You played. You were a child. You were young.

The smell of ozone is one you’ll never forget. Sharp and particular, it fills the nose like a fog and sets your teeth on edge, raises your hair. It crackles in the air as though physical, in the moments before lightning strikes, and here is where your fear of storms starts: when you feel pain, white-hot and blinding, and you wake up in a hospital room.

Dominic Swain was not your _best_ friend as a child, but he was a friend, and you cared for him. He was a little pushy. He was the confident to your meek. You were never a leader.

You were eight years old when he dragged you out of your little country home to play in the fields on his grandmother’s property, a mile or so down the road. There was a copse of trees a little ways from the house, but mostly it was all field, stretching far as the eye could see. You grew up in a place with wide skies: blue and white in all directions, vast and all-encompassing. The sky might’ve swallowed the land if you stared upward for too long, you thought sometimes. The sky might’ve swallowed you, if you let it.

He dragged you out of your little country home and badgered you into playing tag, and then hide-and-seek, and then manhunt, and then, and then. He kept you out long past the limit of your patience. You were too meek, then, to tell him you’d had enough. So you let him tug you along as the sun sunk and dark clouds swept in, moving fast and menacing. You were not afraid of them just yet, but when the drizzle started, you wanted to go back inside. You didn’t tell him immediately; he still wanted to play, and Dominic Swain had will far more than you did. But then the drizzle turned to a downpour and thunder crackled and ozone, thick and cloying, filled your lungs and you didn’t know what it was, then, but when your hair started to stand it had nothing to do with fear. _That_ came second.

“Let’s go in,” you pleaded, tugging on Dominic’s sleeve.

He said, “No, I want to keep playing in the rain!” And you sighed. And he was always the leader.

And you said, “Alright,” and that was when the lightning struck.

You know, it’s funny. You remember everything about that night leading up to the strike. You remember his words and his insistence and the smell, but you don’t remember being hit. All that’s there is the pain. And then you woke up in a hospital.

When pain mounts high enough, the distinction between little and lots of pain doesn’t matter so much. When you feel pain so excruciating it’s all you can think, know, be, the point becomes less that you are in pain and more that you have been struck by lightning. Still, if you were pressed to describe it, it might be something like this: hot. Hot and pins-and-needles everywhere, only thick as swords, as stakes, occurring simultaneously in infinite. And the locking-up. Electrocution renders you helpless, immobile, your muscles seizing unstoppably, your body no longer yours to control.

Oh, that doesn’t come close to what it felt like, of course. But at a certain point describing pain becomes pointless. The point is you were struck by lightning.

You woke up in the hospital. It was white, as white as your vision had gone in that moment, and it was more than confusion that jumped your heartrate enough to bring nurses running in. You panicked. You were eight years old and frightened and as you looked down at yourself, the echo of what had hurt you was branded into your skin. The Lichtenberg figure, arcing over your limbs and up your neck, white and broken and mocking.

You have had many people tell you, over the years, how cool your scars are. You’ve had more give you looks of pity, and some of outright disgust or derision. The people who think they’re cool infuriate you the most. It would not be cool if they were struck by lightning. It would not be cool if the fractals were theirs.

Dominic Swain visited your hospital room once. He came with the rest of your Year 3 classmates, and the only get-well card he gave you was one the whole class had signed. He did not meet your eyes. You were not friends after that.

The scars were what kept most of your revolted attention. You hated them, but your fingertips wouldn’t stop tracing their jagged paths, following their lengths all the way down to where they tapered off near your wrists, at the top of your neck, at the base of your torso. They never really ended. You became convinced of that soon after you were discharged, soon after you began to stay up at night, staring at your scars. The fractals didn’t terminate, they dipped below your skin, criss-crossed your insides, dug deep into the pit of you, trying to upend you, trying to pull you inside-out.

It was then that you cultivated a—well, not a _love of_ , but an _appreciation for_ books. You consumed everything you could about electricity, Lichtenberg figures, meteorology. Your parents saw it as a coping mechanism, and in the beginning, it probably was: a desperate bid to justify things, to rationalize what happened, to prove to yourself it meant something, anything. In the end, it didn’t help. It only drove you to the point of obsession by the age of ten. Only drenched you in fear enough of the fractals that Es Mentiras caught your scent.

The Lichtenberg figure that haunted you, that cursed apparition of the Twisting Deceit’s making, the living lightning—it began at the age of twelve, when what might have been a real storm or might have been only in your own head sent you shivering beneath your covers, blindly travelling the length of your scars with shaking fingertips. It was that repeated realization, that there was no true end to the fractals, that they burrowed into you with the permanence of trauma, that called The Spiral to you.

It teased you. You didn’t realize it until years upon years later, but it never hurt you, never wanted to hurt you. What it wanted was exactly what you gave it: terror, paranoia, the uncertainty of whether the storm was real or imagined. It sent ozone up your nose and made your hair stand up and your heart catch in your throat. It manifested as the very sight of your fear, taunting you as it followed, relentless, and if you knew any less you might wonder if it came from The Hunt.

You had loved storms, once. The way they echoed down from the heavens, a churning of the sky. It’s the loss of that awe that hits hardest, sometimes, though you walk a fine line now between fear and adoration.

It’s funny. You never met Jurgen Leitner, but the man was responsible for both some of the worst experiences of your life, and the one that changed it forever.

 _The Journal of a Plague Year. The Boneturner’s Tale._ The book in Cyrillic. _Ex Altiora._ None of them Leitner’s, not really, but all Leitners in name. The first three chipped away at you just as It Is Not What It Is chipped.

And in the end, _Ex Altiora_ saved you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! hope you're liking this so far. it's going to cover mike's story up to dedicating himself to the vast. i love mike crew a lot and as a vastard myself i JUMP at the chance to write grotesquely poetic descriptions of the sky, lol.
> 
> info in this chap has been primarily drawn from MAG 004 & MAG 091. a quote from MAG 091 really struck me while i was writing, so a fair bit of the same sentiment is present in this chap: "I don’t know if [being struck by lightning is] the most painful thing that can happen to the human body, but… beyond a certain point trying to quantify and measure pain, it becomes pointless. That point is being struck by lighting." let me know what you think!


	2. 002: Rotten Foundation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Journal of a Plague Year_.

It was _The Journal of a Plague Year_ that taught you what the Fears were. Not in so many words, but it gave shape to that vague insistence that there was something out there for you, calling, ready to snap its gaping maw shut on the figure that haunted you.

You found it in a bookstore when you were seventeen. It was a thin volume, moth-eaten at the edges, dusty with age. There were spots of mold on the inside covers that your gaze slid over, content to ignore. You were hungry to seek out what it was about that book that itched at you. The moment you spotted it, you knew there was _something_ to it. You just didn’t know what.

It did not feel the same as the Spiral. It didn’t have that achy, head-throbbing unreality to it. Instead there was some kind of painful realness to it; like its presence was so unfortunately true that you couldn’t not acknowledge it. Something real, something tangible, something you didn’t want to be there but was. It had that kind of aura. It was a more-than book, and you coveted more-than, coveted—though perhaps not consciously yet—a way out.

Bringing it home both was and wasn’t a mistake. If nothing else, you saved the shop you bought it from a fair bit of misfortune, not that it mattered much to you.

You were never close with your parents. Yours was a family that was together simply because everyone lived in the same house; your father didn’t love your mother and you didn’t care much about either of them. Your mother loved you, probably, but she didn’t _like_ you, and after the hospital bills from your accident came in, she gave up all pretenses entirely. To an eight-year-old, it hurt, but by the time you found the book, you’d grown an appreciation for the dynamic—no one faked anything. No one pretended. There was no deception.

So, when you came into the house toting a book that had begun to smell faintly of something rotting, neither of them asked. Your mother cracked the windows, you absconded upstairs, and on your wooden bedroom floor you let _The Journal of a Plague Year_ fall open, and the infection began to spread.

You didn’t know what it was until about a week later, but the release of it into your home didn’t escape your notice. It was almost like a breeze passing you, the way it came forth from those pages, and while it didn’t settle in your skin, you shuddered automatically at the possibility. It wasn’t conscious—you didn’t know, yet, what a Leitner could do, but you felt Filth’s potential all the same. It was a matter of chance, you hope, that it decided on mold instead of a parasite, and the victim was your house instead of your body.

The book was exactly what it said on the tin: a journal. The author, whose name on the front cover was mostly illegible for its grungy quality, but who you discovered was named Daniel Defoe, had lived through The Great Plague of London, 1665. The book was likely based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle, since Defoe himself had been only five years old at the time. Had you actually read it through, and compared it to a normal copy, you would’ve noted that the narration veered sharply into a much more grotesque direction.

But you didn’t finish reading it. You got through a few halting entries, the shaky script of a man uncertain, and yet in the end you were more interested in what the book was _doing_ than anything it had to say. The effects of the Corruption were near-immediate, and it was with a horrific fascination that you watched it eat away at your home.

It was not that your parents couldn’t see it, you don’t think. It was more like something turned their heads away from it. Or perhaps they themselves did—perhaps it was voluntary, the refusal to acknowledge the infection. You saw it well enough. Mold grew in patches on the walls, in the carpet, on the floors, on your food. You ate a lot of take-out, during those two weeks. If not for your burning curiosity, you probably would’ve barely been home. 

What happened was that your house collapsed, unable to keep standing any longer, so diseased and pock-marked that the frame simply caved in. This was nearly exactly two weeks after you brought the book home. Your parents died when it fell upon them (or you hope it did, for you pity anyone infected), and you stood watching, book held loosely in one gloved hand. When you left for good, you tossed it into a sewer, done with it.

It taught you three things.

One: there are powers in the world. You did not know yet to call them Fears, but you knew your electric stalker was part of one, and that the disease was part of another.

Two: books hold the keys to these powers, if you know where to look.

Three: one of them was waiting for you.

You couldn’t have known that last one for sure, of course. But you felt, deep in your gut, that it was true. You _needed_ it to be true. You needed an escape from the wretched thing that haunted you.

You could only hope that the next book you found would be the one to give it to you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> while i was doing research for this one, i noticed that in TMA canon, mike calls the book 'The Journal of a Plague Year,' but the real actual book by Daniel Defoe is called ' _A_ Journal of _the_ Plague Year.' dunno if that was intentional on jonny sims' part, but there ya go.
> 
> mike's parents/family is something i was excited to touch on, simply because of the utter LACK of information about them. absolutely nowhere in TMA canon does mike or any of his associates ever talk about his parents, except for the vague mention that they died when he got this book. why? did it not affect him? did his Becoming warp his emotional attachment to them? who knows! i chose to make his family dynamic all sorts of fucked up because it made sense to me re: his motivations & actions.
> 
> all of the info in this chapter is expanded upon from one (1) quote in MAG 091: "I found The Journal of a Plague Year when I was seventeen. I was lucky, I suppose, that it wasn’t anything worse. It infected the house, of course, brought it crashing down upon my parents in a collapse of diseased brick and septic foundations, but I escaped. And more than that, my eyes were opened to the powers that might save me."
> 
> leave a comment if you liked, as always!


	3. 003: Skin Deep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Boneturner's Tale_.

You took to perusing libraries and bookstores, after the journal. Everywhere you could find, running your fingers along every spine you could reach. After a few years, you found _The Boneturner’s Tale_ , shoved into the corner of an old, overlooked bookshelf in a damp library basement. It was so gross down there it was beginning to grow mold, and you’d have suspected this new book to be of the same ilk as _The Journal of a Plague Year_ were it not for the way it _felt_.

The best way to describe that simple black paperback would probably be _visceral_. For something so unassuming, so clearly well-worn by old owners, one side of the cover slightly sun-bleached, it oozed a revolting aura. It was heavy. It felt like churning, like the sick slick of intestines sliding against each other, like being trapped, like taking the reigns to twist open a new exit.

It was no surprise when you found out The Flesh’s name. _The Boneturner’s Tale_ felt fleshy, felt like the clack of bones against each other, like the slap of the meat in between.

Its cover bore no mention of any author, just the title in simple white text. Over the weeks you had it, you figured out it was a corrupt reimagining of _The Canterbury Tales_. You devoured the words, though not out of any real love for them. It simply felt like opportunity. Like perhaps you could twist yourself different enough that the fractals would scatter and fade.

You learned quickly that that wasn’t true, of course, but it didn’t stop you from trying. And, even if it didn’t set you free, _The Boneturner’s Tale_ was educational in other ways.

In trying to figure out what it could do, you certainly didn’t practice first on yourself—that would be just asking for something like the strike to happen all over again. Instead, you decided to observe its effects on others, watching, studying, seeing what it was capable of. What, perhaps, you could _use_.

This was, incidentally, when you committed your first murder.

The poor woman who was jogging in town after the sun had gone down was an easy target for anyone, though perhaps she’d have been better off if some random man had stolen her down an alleyway. Alive, at least, most likely. Or maybe death would have been better than the trauma a rape or mugging would’ve given her. You weren’t one to make that call. You just needed a test subject.

The way you yanked her bones through her body, twisted them, unknit her flesh and reattached it elsewhere—to be frank, it made you sick to your stomach. But it was more what it looked like than what you were doing to her that unsettled you, even with the screams. Maybe. You can’t remember well what guilt was like before The Vast took you—perhaps you were horrified by your actions. Perhaps you did feel shame for killing her. You couldn’t say. All that really mattered in the moment was clawing your way toward the goal.

What you _can_ say is that you killed her, and it wasn’t painless, and you still didn’t know exactly what the book was capable of, and so a few nights later you stalked the streets again in search of a new subject. And on it went, for a few weeks as the book’s hold on you grew, until you felt confident enough to turn the pages back on yourself, and try to unmake your accident.

It did not _hurt_ exactly, except that it did. And it changed you bodily, yes, but those maddening scars still ran through every piece of you that undulated and ripped and flayed. The Lichtenberg figure was burned into you, set beneath your flesh in a way that could never be pulled up, more than skin-deep.

When you realized _The Boneturner’s Tale_ couldn’t help you, you screamed with the frustration of it. It was an angry, betrayed thing. And that’s when The Spiral decided to make the newest phantom storm set in, and ozone filled your nose, and you ran with tears in your eyes from a specter that could not be lost.

You left the book in some other library, at the book return, still buzzing with anxiety from the “storm.” You didn’t care who next might pick it up. 

You just wanted it gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to the one (1) person subscribed to this, ao3 user exaltioras (i think it's you??) you a real one
> 
> this chapter took info from MAG 017 & MAG 091, though most of it was extrapolated from this quote: " _The Boneturner’s Tale_ was next. Found tucked away in a waterlogged library basement, and deposited back in another. I played with it, but when I tried to shift the bits of myself I thought might set me free, the only shapes I could form with them were laced with that horrid, hunting fractal. My experiments weren’t entirely pointless, though, they did have a truth to me. I learned that I was more than capable of killing, if it brought me closer to what I needed."
> 
> i realize that these chapters are all very short and summarizey, and i'm sure i could stretch them out and make this fic novel-length if i really tried, but honestly i just want to play around with mr. mike crew's character and motives
> 
> anyway as always lmk what you think in the comments! :>


	4. 004: Read, Read

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The book in Cyrillic.

The book in Cyrillic was your strangest find, simply for the fact that you didn’t actually _find_ it. It appeared one day on your bookshelves, sitting innocuously among the tomes you’d been gathering since you were young. It was small, a grey paperback with an odd, sort of rough material for the cover, clearly old but with the spine barely cracked, as though not many people had ever actually read it. There was no title or author on it anywhere, just another of those damned Leitner nameplates.

It felt so startlingly neutral, compared to the others, but with the faintest hint of attention. Like it was aware. Like it knew, and was looking.

You couldn’t read it of course, but you perused it, flipping through its pages, trying to sus out what its effects might be. You hoped, desperately, that this might be the one to save you. You knew quickly that it wasn’t.

It did not happen immediately—it was slow, insidious, and you’re not sure exactly what clued you in but you’re convinced even now that if you’d done one thing differently, it would have consumed you.

The most overt of its effects was the paranoia. It wasn’t strictly the feeling of being watched, not at first, but you felt that creep up your spine, like something dangerous was around that you couldn’t see. You knew, logically, it was probably the Leitner. That did not stop you from doing your damndest to check every dark corner. Better not to leave things up to chance.

But then came being watched, and then came the curiosity, and then came finding yourself standing in your living room in the dead of night, that book open in your palms, your eyes staring blankly, for you were not reading it. _It_ was reading _you_.

When you came back to yourself, you slammed it shut, breath heaving. The Eye was not for you, no. You did not need something that would merely watch your monster follow you, bright and maddening. You needed something to be _rid_ of it.

You buried the book out in an open moor, far from any homes or businesses. It was quiet out there, solitary, and you thought that it would be a good resting place for something so curious. Put it down, leave it where it couldn’t _watch_ anymore.

You left, shivering from the wind, glancing upward at the evening sky, cloudy and so, so wide.

You did not know yet, how soon it would take you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chap was based off this quote from MAG 091: "I spent some time with a small grey volume, I think it was in Cyrillic, that decided it was at home amongst my bookshelves. I couldn’t read it, of course, but… when it tried to read me back, I buried it on a lonely stretch of moorland."
> 
> i know jonny likely didn't mean the book Literally appeared on mike's shelves, but i decided that would be a fun spin on it, so there ya go.
> 
> sorry that this chap is so short. i kinda just want to be done with this fic. thank you to the people who are enjoying it, i'm glad you've found some value in this stupid fic, haha. leave a comment if you're still enjoying it.


	5. 005: The Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am yours!

You don’t remember the bookshop you find it in all that well. You’d been frequenting it for months before you found _Ex Altiora_ , but the moment the book entered your life, everything else seemed to fall away. Nothing was so important.

It was called Lion Street Books, you think. The shop-owner was one of those typical, somewhat stingy book enthusiasts. He tried to keep _Ex Altiora_ from you. You offered him money you didn’t have, and when the book was in your hands, you stopped caring. You didn’t bother to produce it. 

The second you got home, you devoured it. You could feel what it offered from the moment you laid eyes on it—weightlessness, adrenaline, freedom—and you knew, perfectly, that this was the book for you. You spent hours poring over the Latin text, lovingly translating it and then copying it out in its original Latin, caressing the woodcuts. The book made you dizzy and you relished in it. You felt as though you might fall into those pictures and you wished you would.

You don’t know how long it was that you pored over the text, not bothering to eat or bathe or sleep. One day, though, when you’d sat up and felt on the precipice of something, there came a knock at your door.

You opened it to find the bookseller. In that moment, though, you looked far beyond him. He was hardly a presence worth any thought; he was inconsequent, intangible. All that mattered to you then was the scent of rain, the scent of ozone, the sound of the thunderclaps, all of which suddenly swept into you as you opened your door.

You had the book in your hands. You could feel the Deceit encroaching. You _knew what to do_.

You took off running.

The highest point nearby was Chichester Cathedral, and you went straight for it, eyes turned upward. The sky was dark and roiling, lightning arcing across it. It was the first real storm you had seen since your strike, and the first storm you were not afraid of. This was not of the Spiral’s making. This was real, true, and it swirled and whipped far above in the Vast’s domain.

Lightning belongs in the sky, after all.

You grinned, a wild, furious thing, as you sprinted away from that arcing figure that tormented you. You threw open the doors to the cathedral’s bell tower. The fact that it was locked did not matter; a gust of air swept it open, and up you climbed, your legs feeling light, your head filled with the rush of something you’d always known but could never name.

On the edge of the tower, overlooking the city, staring up at the sky, you held the book open to face the Vast. You spoke ritual words that came not from you, but from a place beyond you, your lips the mouthpiece. The intention was all yours, though, and when the Deceit appeared before you, buzzing, twisting, you looked at its figure and thought _you belong in the sky_.

 _I am yours,_ you promised internally. “I am yours!” you shouted aloud as the Spiral’s monster was trapped, and you cast yourself out into the Vast, tipping off the edge of the precipice.

It was—beautiful. It was nothing you could ever name. It was sky and sea and void and cloud and storm and current and silence and noise and it stretched out as far as you could see, as far as you could conceptualize. It was adrenaline and vertigo and it was yours. You felt the fall. You felt like you were floating. You knew what it was to allow the wind to curve around you, support you, rather than tearing at your skin; you knew what it was to move with it rather than against it. You _became_.

It was a deep howling come to call you. A great and terrible, haunting song. It reverberated down from the sky and echoed upward from the oceans. It was a siren’s call, the whip of the wind, the churn of your gut as you stood on the edge of a high tower, as you prepared to jump from a cliff into the water below.

It was something that lived in the very pit of your stomach as it turned over and over. It was that adrenaline rush you know so well. You always beelined for the coasters at the fairs, didn’t you? You always dove straight into the deep end of the pool.

The Vast satisfied something deep within you. It completed you, slotted into place a piece you didn’t know was missing. You ripped your eyes open and saw endless sky, and you were falling into it.

Gone was the cathedral and the city and the bookseller. All that existed was the Vast. All that mattered was that you were falling in it, and it felt perfect, felt right. _Ex Altiora_ was gone, but you didn’t need it anymore. You knew instinctually, like genetic knowledge, what the Vast was. What it offered. What you could do.

The storm was gone. The sky was clear. The clouds were white and puffy, and below, there was only a hazy blueness to fall into. There was no ground to hit. There was no deception in that, only simple truth.

You laughed, then. It was a song of freedom. Of relief.

The Vast felt like love at its purest.

You fell into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok thank god its done. you know the drill, insp taken from MAG 046 and 091. also i was inspired by [seraf's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf) writing on mike crew, pls check that out it fucking rules
> 
> stan mike crew


End file.
